036: Fall in Love with Your Brain — the Science of Mindfulness

When trying to do more than one thing at a time, are you multitasking or multi-failing? The brain likes harmony. It can truly only focus on one thing at a time. When we are bombarded with distractions and interruptions, our brains shrink and our memories flatten. How? Host, Mike Domitrz welcomes Scott Halford for a scientific and mindful discussion about why it’s important to be intentional, to be present, and to reset your mind three times a day.

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Key Takeaways:

[2:20] What mindfulness mean to Scott.

[3:37] Scott helps people who beat up their brains.

[7:24] Reset your Cortisol to find true mindfulness.

[17:34] The Ellen Langer experiment.

[21:41] Clear out your prefrontal cortex.

[25:19] Be intentional and do the heavy lifting in the morning.

[28:46] Books Scott finds transformational.

Transcription (5,798 More Words)

Introduction:	Welcome to the Everyday Mindfulness Show, the off the cuff exploration of everyday aha moments and life experiences. Join a cast of over 70 uniquely brilliant individuals. Each week Mike Domitrz and an eclectic mix of cast members and special guests will engage in mindful and lively conversations about everything from meditation to spirituality, to personal passions, to successes and failures, to relationships, to the stuff that makes up the moments of our daily lives. Let’s get started with your host, author, speaker, provocateur, and a bit of a goofball, Mike Domitrz.
Mike Domitrz:	This week’s episode is sponsored by the book “Can I Kiss You?” and the instructor’s guide of “Can I Kiss You?” For many listeners know, this is the book that I wrote. Last year it came out. We were thrilled because it went number one on Amazon for teen and young adult dating. It is filled, just packed, with how to skillsets for anyone to ready of any age. We used to have a certain age group and people say, “Will you stop doing that? I have a middle schooler that I want to read this book. I’m 45, single. I need to read this book.” We’ve had people who are married going, “It’s helped changed my relationship.” That’s why this is this week’s sponsor, the “Can I Kiss You?” book.
	If you’re a teacher, the instructor’s guide. You can both at DateSafeProject.org. That’s DateSafeProject.org or you can call Rita in our offices at 800-329-9390. That’s this week’s sponsor. Yes. I’m your host Mike Domitrz and thrilled to be here with a very special person today on the Everyday Mindfulness Show and that is Scott Halford. This week is a one-on-one chat. It’s just me and Scott sharing, discovering, asking questions. Of course, you can learn all about Scott by going onto our website at EverydayMindfulnessShow.com. Clicking the link, it’ll take you to Scott’s website, give you all the information. We want to get you to meeting Scott. Scott, thank you for joining us here today.
Scott Halford:	It’s great to be here. Thanks for having.
Mike Domitrz:	Of course. Scott, we’re all about everyday mindfulness here. You study the brain and how the brain works. With mindfulness, I mean this is so in alignment as far as what you do for a living and what your passion is, what your mission is. When you hear about mindfulness, what does it mean to you?
Scott Halford:	I’m a little geeky when it comes to it because I like the science aspect of it. The cool thing about it is is that for a lot of people, mindfulness feels like a scary woo-woo kind of spiritual type of thing. It is. It can be, but it also has some really, really important roots in the neuroscience of how we grow our brain and actually the anti-aging of our brain. Lately the research on what mindfulness does to actually plump a part of the brain that holds the memories is profound. People who actually do this, de-age their brain. They allow themselves to remember more. We all know and can probably make some suppositions about how it distresses us, but it actually … Again there is a de-aging aspect to it because it takes cortisol, stressor hormone levels, down.
	Therefore, what it allows you to do is to think in ways and innovate in ways that you won’t be able to do if you are constantly in a pelting non-mindful kind of way. I look at it from a wonky scientific way.
Mike Domitrz:	No, I love that because we’re going to have people who listen and go, “Hey, where is the logic? Where is the proof,” and that comes from that perspective. Scott, could you give a little background on where you are coming from because I briefly said you study the brain, but could you explain what you do, so people listening really understand this is your expertise?
Scott Halford:	I work with leaders in typically larger corporations who are relatively high level who are experiencing quite a lot of stress and what have you and are really at the pinnacle of their career where either they’re going to plateau or they’re going to perform at higher levels. What we found that makes the difference is not their IQ, not even their EQ, though that has a lot to do with it, but their ability to manage and understand their biology and understand their brain. I teach leadership through the lens of neuroscience and helping people to really kind of wrap their heads around, if you will, their heads, wrap their heads around their heads, to understand what the brain has to say about their performance on an everyday basis.
	Because the vast majority of people abuse their brains in such a way that if they actually could take it and make it something else, like a very expensive instrument, like a Stradivarius violin, right? Sold at auction for $11 million a few years ago. If a concert violinist bought that and then took it and beat it up on the stage before they began to play and then sat down and expected it to play amazing music, that would be absurd. That’s what we do to our brains and our brains are much more priceless than a Stradivarius. That’s my background. I write about it. I think about it. I have books about it. My whole goal is for people to fall in love with their brains and spend more money on their brains than they do their car.
Mike Domitrz:	You’re a neuroscientist, right? That’s what you do.
Scott Halford:	I wouldn’t call myself that. That would be lovely, but I study neuroscience. I have a master’s at it, but true neuroscientists are PhDs in the research aspect of it. I researched the leadership. I’m more interested in the business side of it and then taking and kind of substantiating what we already know about things like mindfulness by bringing the science to it so that people who are a little bit skeptical say, “Okay. There is a neurocore. It actually has a benefit to my brain. Of course, I’ll do it.”
Mike Domitrz:	I love what you said there about … I mean it’s not good news, but I love the way you explained it so simply about beating up the brain. Let’s go there. What are ways people are beating up their brains?
Scott Halford:	I call it cortisol paper cuts. Cortisol is your stressor hormone. It’s incredibly important for you to focus. Cortisol is a really great thing to a point. It rises about two to three times its natural state in the morning to awaken you and it focuses you. It’s interesting from that point forward what we do. We waste our focused amount of cortisol on emails and interacting with road rage and waking up and watching news and dealing with our loved ones and getting out the door and da, da, da, da, da, da and it’s a paper cut, paper cut. Cortisol is added to it. What it does is it rises and then you hit a perfect spot and that’s your focus. When you get too much, you literally fall off into disorganization and anxiety.
	What ends up happening is not just from a behavioral standpoint, but your organs actually begin to basically shut down because your body is going into a fighter flight system. Over time what happens is you shrink your brain, which is going to happen anyway after you’re 30 and why would you want to do that more quickly. Cortisol shrinks it. It also flattens the part of the brain that allows you to have memory and what is your ability other than your memory. Being able to retrieve and learn and create memory. That’s what we do as humans. That’s hugely affected. Cortisol, cortisol, cortisol, cortisol and there’s no erasing of it throughout the day. What I really encourage people to do is to take at least three 10 minute moments throughout their day to just look out the window.
	I mean look at your window behind. We know that nature actually changes the brain. I mean we know that nature not just changes the architecture of the brain, but actually changes the neurochemistry of the brain. Literally looking outside out of a window, stopping what you’re doing. We’re just sitting there and letting your mind wander untethered from your smartphone and your computer brings the cortisol level down. Actually re kind of constitutes your brain if you will. Takes the inflammation down and you can start again. It’s the 50-10 rule. Sprint for 50, intense, intense, intense in your brain and then 10 minutes of break. That’s pretty well researched. The actual research is 52 on and 17 off.
Mike Domitrz:	That’s really interesting because when I do all day trainings, I mandate that we go 50 on 10 off and I did not know there was the science behind that.
Scott Halford:	You found it. Yeah.
Mike Domitrz:	I knew that it makes a huge difference. I can see the huge difference, but now that science really makes that sense. Now what a lot of people do, and I fall into this trap, is we live right next right to the water. I get up and in the morning now that we live at this place I go on the kayak and go out and meditate for 20 minutes and then come back in. It is just relaxing, which you described, here’s the challenge, life comes in after that. You bring up a really important point. You’re like three times at 10 minutes. Because if you set the day off right, but by noon you do have all that email and everything coming back in, you need a reset is what you’re really saying here, three times.
	If you’re doing the first one at 6:00 or 7:00 AM, then the next one at 1:00, and then one in the evening to calm the brain for sleep, is there a good chronological system to it?
Scott Halford:	It varies and it’s different for every person. The goal is to find at least three. I mean if you can do it four or five … The research is showing that if u can get up to 45 minutes a day of true mindfulness and true mindfulness is not just wandering out the window, true mindfulness is actually holding something in your mind and only focusing on it and being completely present with it, if you can get to 45 minutes a day of that, that’s where we actually see architecture in the brain, the frontal lobes, the hippocampus plump, the memory center. We see actually growth of really important real estate in the brain, which is cool because that’s what age is.
	If you are at least doing the wandering out the window, that’s where we reset the cortisol. I encourage people to be intentional about their day, which is being more mindful. That is work on one thing at a time. You’re going to have the interruptions that you can’t stop. You’re going to get phone calls, popup emails. The worst thing in the whole world for the human brain, popup emails, things like Jabber. Being instantly contacted in the moment for every moment. It literally creates this messy mind and so you can’t focus. You can’t get on that focus. If you’re intentional, you’ll say, “I’m going to open up what I’m going to open up. I’m going to work on in. 50 minutes. Be really intense on it.” Manage the distractions.
	Start letting people know this is important to me that I’m going to be working on. Only emergencies contact me. You’ll be surprised how many people actually figure out their own stuff and then you take that 10 minute break. Go hydrate. Walk out in nature. Sit there and let your mind wander. Listen to music. Play a game. Just anything that is different than the electricity that you just were in resets the whole thing. There are a variety of different ways to go at it. It’s not just one thing. You don’t have to just sit there because some people are not good with hanging out with themselves. It’s really interesting.
Mike Domitrz:	Right. Oh, I know. Absolutely.
Scott Halford:	Right?
Mike Domitrz:	Yeah. Here’s the thing you brought up, you said intentional with a thought. I’ve learned various versions of meditation. A lot of meditation either has no thought process, but some mantra. Is the mantra the intention? In other words, you said you need intention for the chemistry, the science to work itself. There needs to be a single thought. In a lot of meditation is to not think, but is the theory there that the mantra is what you’re referring to there if somebody’s using a mantra?
Scott Halford:	It could be the mantras so long as that you’re not basically becoming numb to the mantra. Mantras can actually help empty your brain and don’t get me wrong. That form of meditation is amazing, does amazing things, but where we’re really … Where the research is really focus is on true mindfulness. True mindfulness is like one of the exercises I do in my workshops is have people hold a raisin in their mouth for 90 seconds and the only thing they can think about is anything, but the raisin. They have to keep the raisin moving in their mouth for 90 seconds. At the end of 90 seconds, they need to have some remnant of the raisin leftover. They can’t park the raisin, so they have to actually work to hold it in their mouth.
	There’s some difficulty to that. They have a raisin in their mouth. It’s really difficult not to think about the raisin, but I asked them just to let their minds wander. That’s a network called the default mode network. That’s where we go when we’re not thinking about anything, when we’re in the car and just kind of in that mellow, just kind of folding away. It’s a very creative space. If you’re just sitting there, that resets the cortisol. It’s the default mode network. That is one form of what we’re talking about. The other talking form is putting a raisin again in your mouth and this time 90 seconds. Don’t get to keep time. Moving it the whole time. Some remnant of raisin leftover, but the only thing you can think about is the raisin.
	Every time your mind wanders off, takes off, you have to get back on the raisin. It is really difficult to keep that raisin in mind for 90 seconds without your brain trailing off. We’ve all seen the research of your brain stays focused five to seven seconds, which is true unless you train it. That actual activity of training it, of focus is so incredibly difficult for the brain because it’s doing two things at one time. It’s doing inhibitory and excitatory impulses in the brain. It inhibits everything that’s trying to get its attention, squirrel, squirrel, and it excites because you’re telling it to do something, which is to mind the raisin. Both of those at the same time create the neurochemical bath that the brain needs in order for that architecture to grow.
	It’s literally being focused on the thing. The mantra can do it if you stay on the mantra and your head stays on the mantra. If you do the mantra and you wander, you’re now in the default mode network. Does it make sense?
Mike Domitrz:	It makes total sense. It makes you really evaluate a lot of meditation because as you know, a lot of people when they hear meditation they think, “Oh, I can’t be quiet for that long. I’ve tried it and a million thoughts are coming through my head.” What you’re saying is it’s really the intentionality where the science kicks in. If I do that 20 minutes where I’m trying to just do mantra and clear the mind, that doesn’t meant that I still don’t want to do those three to five 10 minutes of intentionality, which is what you’re referring to, that one focus point. That intentionality, what do you look for it to be? Do you look for business intentionality? Personal life intentionality? What would be good intentionality for calming cortisol?
Scott Halford:	Literally anything that you decide to focus on, and you stay there, it calms the brain. If you decide that you’re going to work on a project, and it requires a good deal of prefrontal cortex thinking, your cognition, but you stay on it and you don’t get focused. You’ve done this, right? You’ve written books, and you’ll write, and you know what that feels like. Well, that’s your brain in synchrony. It’s entrained, right? It’s in synchrony. The brain likes harmony. Disharmony is what happens when we get interruption, interruption. It literally is this attentional blank. When you get attentional blank, cortisol goes up because it says, “Oh, danger. Oh, there’s a popup. Oh, there’s a message. Oh, that needs your attention.”
	When we calm that and say, “I’m going to focus on this one thing,” whether it is a project, a raisin, eating, a conversation you’re having with your loved one where you literally stay present. Mindfulness is about everything right now. We have this really weird ability, right? When a lion goes off and she kills her prey, she’s doing her job, right? She thinks about her prey and that’s what she does. She kills the prey and she takes it away, right? That’s it. She’s present. She’s completely present. As human beings, we have some really cool architecture in our heads that allows us to do our job, but think about things I have to do next week and what do I have in the refrigerator and now I got to pick up my dry cleaning.
	We can do that while we’re pretending to do this and that split attention is not only detrimental to the brain, it’s detrimental to the quality of whatever you’re trying to do. We multi fail instead of multitask. The brain is really, really good at one thing at a time. It’s linear. It’s not multi. That linear process is actually the healthy piece and that’s what mindfulness entrainment does, and you can do it with anything. It just means you got to be present.
Mike Domitrz:	I love it. What you’re saying is where a lot of times people think, “I have this major stressor in my life. My child is struggling with this or my spouse or I’m struggling with a personal situation,” whatever it is and you think, “Okay. I just want to go meditate to get away from that,” but really maybe 10 minutes of intentional focus thought on that is what you’re saying could really bring down the cortisol levels and the stress level.
Scott Halford:	Try a mindful conversation with your significant other tonight. Literally for five minutes where you … Five minutes, just that, where your full attention is sitting across from that person. You’re only focused on the aspect that they bring, so they bring you good news or bad news, and you stay in it. You don’t make it about you. You don’t make it about a solution, which is a future. You don’t make it about, “Oh, I tried this,” which was the past. You literally stay present. Watch how it changes the texture of the conversation. It’s about staying where you are, staying present. Ellen Langer, she just wrote a book called “Counterclockwise.” It’s a fantastic study. She is a psychologist who studies mindfulness, as well as some other neuro kinds of aspects.
	She and Jon Kabat-Zinn are contemporaries. She wrote this book about this group of men who she took and at baseline measured their cortisol, their blood pressure, all of the basically markers of their age if you will. They were in their 80s. They took them, and she put them in a village for a week. In this village, it was a village that was everything in it had cars and homes and billboards, everything was from the 1950s when they were young men. The only thing they could bring with them were clothes of that age and pictures of that age. After the week, what they did and basically what they were doing is saturating them with mindfulness. They had to be present because that’s where they were. They couldn’t think about things out there and here.
	All they’re discussions were about everything from the ’50s and they had the music and everything. After a week, they basically re-measured all of their body functions if you will, and they had discovered that they had de-aged by about 15 years. This book is being made into a movie. I mean it’s stunning what your brain will help you do, but you got to understand it. You got to work it and mindfulness is one of the most powerful things on the planet from everything from the very basic thing to the actual growth and de-aging of your brain. Cool stuff.
Mike Domitrz:	What I love about it, it applies to so much of our lives whether it be professional, personal. I mean I could think of how many people struggled to be present in the bedroom sexually, how many distractions they bring in. They’re not fully there with their partner. In my line of work you get to hear from a lot of people saying, “It just isn’t the same anymore,” but that’s because they’re not taking the time to make it as exciting and as passionate. You think what if they took that 10 minutes before the bedroom to be intentional about the bedroom and totally be present. When that person walks in, they’re there. They’re present. Not, “Hey, did you get that thing done,” as they’re undressing to have sex with the person.
	It’s common though, right? “Hey, did you see this? Did you see that?” You’re losing the intention of the focus of the presence of the person you’re with. It’d be so powerful to say, “Hey, before let’s just both take 10 minutes and really think what we want and when we get back together.” It could be really powerful.
Scott Halford:	I think there we get really convinced in those situations as well as in our life especially as we grow up with the people in our life. I think we become convinced tat we know that our brain knows everything about them. When you get present, you discover new things about people everyday, the same people everyday. It’s stunning. We have a koi pond in our backyard and koi, for those who don’t know what a koi is, it’s kind of a fancy carp, Japanese. They live to be 100 years old. They’re prized because they do live so long. We have 17 of them. Everyone of them has a name and everyone of them has a different personality.
	We will sit out there every single day when I’m home, every single day, and I just was saying that it’s stunning to me that we can look at our fish every single day and still talk about them every single day because we find new things about them everyday because we’re focused on them. That’s what happens in a relationship. When you’re actually present, you abandon that false idea that you know everything about them and what happen in the bedroom. We kind of cheat ourselves by saying, “Okay. There’s nothing new and interesting about Mike. Nothing new and interesting about Scott or whoever,” right?
Mike Domitrz:	Right. Right.
Scott Halford:	It’s wrong. We do have new and interesting everyday. We just have to pay attention.
Mike Domitrz:	I love this discussion because you … This is what you study, this is what you live, where are your own struggle? Where are areas that you struggle because we all know that if you do mindfulness, it doesn’t mean you do it right. You don’t have days you don’t do it. Where do you find for yourself, Scott, are moments where you have to … Do you create a trigger for yourself when you’re not in the place you want to be or is it more of a review of the day going, “Wish I had taken the time for that.” I have a friend that … You know Sean Stevenson and Sean has a life sucks list and a life works list. I might be using the wrong language there. If he reviews his day, if he did the life works list stuff, life works. If he did the life sucks list stuff, life usually sucked.
	It helps him to look back and have the evaluation where was I intentional. Do you have systems in place to help you?
Scott Halford:	Yeah. For me, my triggers are when things start falling through the cracks and I try to hold too much in my prefrontal cortex, which is kind of like short-term memory. When you’re not mindful, phone numbers and chores and things I said I would do and oh, I’ll text this and I’ll email that, it falls out. It literally falls out of the prefrontal cortex. Your working memory works less better when it’s messy. That’s trying to hold not being mindful. If that’s what happens for me. My trigger is I can’t find my keys, I misplaced this, I misplace that, and it typically happens in a cascade or I’ll be working, “Oh my gosh. I forgot. I got to get that email out that I said I would.” When I have a lot of those, I’m like, “All right. I’m going to go out. I’m going to reset. Focus on one thing.
	Write things down.” Huge, huge, huge. Write things down because actually when you write something down, it is a signal to your brain that it no longer has to remember it, which is a really great thing. Then you can be mindful on what you are working on right here and now. I find myself having to do that a lot. I just kind of retrigger. For me, my system is not crazy. It’s literally write things down. It doesn’t matter how old you are. I mean you would think with all this gray hair I’m just saying it because I’m old. I don’t care if you’re 20 years old. It’s a waste of your prefrontal cortex to hold little minuscule bits and pieces in it that you want to remember all day because this is the thing that creates the universe.
	This is what’s created everything that you’re sitting in and you’re wearing and this technology. No other beast in the planet can do it because they don’t have a prefrontal cortex like we do and yet we use it as if it’s like having a tune in that to go get a goldfish out of the ocean. It’s like overkill. It’s such a powerful tool and yet we don’t use it the way we should use it and we don’t calm it down so that it can find the next big idea, the next big meaning in our lives.
Mike Domitrz:	Well, it reminds me of I think it’s the secretweapon.org or .com. Are you aware of this? It’s the combination of taking getting things done, the book concept and the strategy behind that, with Evernote so that when you have a thought in your mind, you immediately log it so that you can release it and yet still move on with your day and have it come back where it belongs. It’s a brilliant system for anybody who’s never seen it. I learned it in NSA, National Speakers Association event. I was sitting next to a friend Bruce Turkel. I was sitting and whispered, “Mike, have you seen this,” and it changed my life because it has categories. If something’s coming in my head, I immediately okay, write that down.
	Is that a one to three in my priorities? If it’s a one, I’m going to see it again because I’ll check my ones at the end of the day or the beginning of the day. If it’s a two or a three, I almost never see it again, which tells me I didn’t need to see it in the first place. If I don’t do that writing down, the two or three can be at the front or coming in and out of the head, in and out of the head all day long. I could’ve released it a long time ago.
Scott Halford:	What happens when we don’t have a system around what is important is that we do the unimportant things first because they’re easy. We’ll clear out email, which is the exact wrong thing to do in the morning. Your brain is most powerful in the morning. It’s got the right amount of cortisol. You haven’t had the abuses of the day happen. In the morning, do heavy lifting, but what we do is we read newspaper and we write emails.
Mike Domitrz:	Let’s talk about the heavy lifting. I want to dive in that, the heavy lifting part there. Which heavy lifting should we tackle because there’s two kinds of heavy lifting? There’s the heavy lifting of the thing you don’t want to do, but then there’s the heavy lifting of that high creative thing that needs your strategic thinking like writing, like creating a project. If you’re not a writer, maybe it’s building something you’re going to build, but it takes high brain intellect for you to use that. Which of those two should be the priority of heavy lifting, the one you don’t want to do or the one that takes a lot of brain capacity?
Scott Halford:	I think both. I think if you look at your day and you look at your week for instance, I think you’ll find that the things you don’t want to do, the more you do them, the fewer they become.
Mike Domitrz:	Right.
Scott Halford:	Everyday you don’t have something you don’t want to do. You get that done. You can get that done, that thing you don’t want to do especially if it’s out of your wheelhouse. For me, out of my wheelhouse …
Mike Domitrz:	Yeah. That’s what I’m referring to, out of wheelhouse. Right? That you don’t want it. Because if it’s in your wheelhouse, you normally want to do it. It’s out of wheelhouse you don’t want to do.
Scott Halford:	I like to write, but sometimes it’s in my wheelhouse, but it’s hard and I want to do it. There’s that. That’s in my wheelhouse, don’t want to do it. Then there is out of wheelhouse, don’t want to do it and those are the hardest things like getting into QuickBooks and balancing all my checkbooks because I put it off and put it off. I had three months to do. I did it yesterday. I just decided I’m going to focus and I’m staying here. No interruptions. I’m doing it. I had to force myself and take my advice, do the heavy lifting. I can’t do it in the afternoon because squirrel, squirrel, squirrel, right, because the cortisol levels allow me to defocus. It’s too high, right?
	I do it in the morning and get those done. On other mornings, I don’t have something staring at me that is so don’t want to do, have to do kind of thing. Because again I get realistic and say, “No. I’m creating a lot more bugaboos out there than actually exist.” This morning my heavy lifting is going to be around creative pursuit. It’s going to be around sitting down and writing something or I’m thinking about changing something in my program or calling somebody and interacting. I love to interact with other people in a creative way in the morning because I create things and I can write things down. I think you make decisions everyday. When you’re intentional, you begin to say, “Okay. I have to do this.
	It’s got to be done today or tomorrow. It’s going to require heavy lifting. Best time to do it is in the morning,” and it’s different for everyone. Most people morning. “Then in the afternoon, I can do some creative things as well because it is something I like to do. I can do it on a less electrically charged brain. I can do some of the stuff that’s not heavy lifting when I don’t have to be as mentally acute.”
Mike Domitrz:	This is awesome. You’re sharing so much brilliance here. What is a book that you just absolutely love to give to others or that provided transformation for you in this area?
Scott Halford:	Well, my own book.
Mike Domitrz:	Well, absolutely. Tell everybody about your book.
Scott Halford:	I have a book called “Activate Your Brain.” Actually it’s interesting because I said to somebody the other day, it’s called “Activate Your Brain: How Understanding Your Brain Can Improve Your Life and Your Work.” I said to somebody the other day, I have a couple of books, I said, “I really like this book.” They’re like, “Well, of course, you do. You wrote it.” I’m like, “No. I like it because not because I wrote it, because I’m just a conduit of really the research that’s out there. I like it because it actually is helpful. People actually read it,” which is interesting, right, because if you have a book, you know a lot of people who have your book, but might not read it.
Mike Domitrz:	The souvenir. Right. It’s more the souvenir. Right.
Scott Halford:	People actually say, “God. I’m in chapter 14 and I’m reading that part on how food affects mood,” and I’m like, “Wow. You really are reading it.” I like that. Other books that are in this genre that I really love, I love “Rewire Your Brain.” Really it’s an awesome book. I like the book “Quiet,” which is by Susan Cain and she’s an introvert. It’s about introversion/extroversion, but really kind of gets to this whole idea of kind of being a settled and calm person. We need that whether we’re an extrovert or an introvert. We need kind of both ends of the spectrum. I really, really like that.
Mike Domitrz:	Awesome. I want to thank you so much for joining us, Scott. For anybody who’s not watching the video, you’re hearing this on the podcast, Scott has a sign behind him. He has a beautiful piece of art behind him, a nice colorful … He also has a sign behind him with almost a Buddha like person that says, “Let that shit go.” That is very, very timely with this discussion of just letting that go and being more intentional. This has been awesome, Scott. For everyone listening right now, we hope that you make today and everyday a mindful day. Thank you so much for joining us. We hope to hear you join us next week on the next episode and remember to subscribe to us on iTunes or wherever you listen to the show.
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Mentioned in This Episode:

Counterclockwise: Mindful Health and the Power of Possibility, by Ellen Langer

Activate Your Brain: How Understanding Your Brain Can Improve Your Work — and Your Life, by Scott Halford

Rewire Your Brain: Think Your Way to a Better Life, by John B. Arden

Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, by Susan Cain

Scott Halford is a writer and long-time educator of businesspeople worldwide. He focuses on brain-based behavioral science, emotional intelligence, critical thinking, and influence. In 2014, Scott was inducted into the National Speakers Speaker Hall of Fame. He has been the Brainy Business columnist for Entrepreneur.com, and blogs for Huffington Post. Scott is the author of Activate Your Brain (2015), a Wall Street Journal best-selling book, and Be a Shortcut – The Secret Fast-track to Business Success.

CompleteIntelligence.com

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